Can Depolarization Be Scaled?

Many civil society groups are responding to our fraught times by building bridges between citizens and groups that see the world differently and enabling them to engage in constructive dialogue. Given all the factors accelerating tribalism, depolarization is really hard work. The challenge is that it ultimately requires transformative change within individuals. This is exceedingly difficult to achieve at the scale needed to make a difference in a country of 330 million people.

One of the most promising opportunities to address this challenge is the work of the Constructive Dialogue Institute (CDI). The institute has developed an online suite of educational tools and supports for colleges and universities, K-12 schools, and corporations. CDI's approach to depolarization is grounded in the best behavioral science research on the topic.

CDI was co-founded in 2017 by Jonathan Haidt, a leading researcher in the field of moral psychology and a serial social entrepreneur. (He also helped start up the Heterodox Academy, whose work I explored in a previous post). Haidt co-founded CDI with Caroline Mehl, who has led the strategy, organizational development, and operational scaling of the enterprise in her role as executive director. I recently posed a set of questions to Caroline about the Institute and its cutting-edge work. Her responses follow.

Tell us about the Constructive Dialogue Institute’s mission and how you carry it out.

Our mission is to equip the next generation of Americans with the habits of heart and mind to bridge divides. Our vision is to help strengthen our civic culture in order to sustain a strong, pluralistic democracy. 

We do this by translating the latest behavioral science research into digital educational tools that are evidence-based, practical, and scalable. Our tools teach people about the inner workings of the mind, what leads us to be divided, and how we can use this knowledge to navigate our differences more effectively. We then disseminate these educational tools across a range of institutions, primarily colleges, universities, and high schools. Since launching five years ago, we've reached more than 50,000 learners across hundreds of institutions. 

Typically, professors and teachers incorporate our online curriculum into their classroom syllabi. Students complete our online lessons as homework, and their instructors integrate the concepts into their teaching. In addition to operating at the classroom level, we're also expanding to work with universities and schools institutionally. For example, we partner with universities to incorporate our online learning into their orientation or first-year experience programming. That way, when students arrive on campus, they gain a shared language and set of practical skills to engage in constructive dialogue across differences.    

Beyond these primary audiences, we also work in a similar capacity with a range of adult audiences, including companies, non-profits, foundations, and local governments. 

How do you see your work fitting into the broader ecosystem of civil society groups working to improve U.S. democracy? What is your niche in that system?

From my perspective, there are four main levers to strengthen U.S. democracy: (1) redesigning electoral systems, (2) strengthening democratic institutions, (3) improving our media ecosystem, and (4) revitalizing our civic culture. Our work at CDI fits within that last lever. 

Compared to the first three levers, strengthening our civic culture has been neglected. I believe this is a critical mistake because lessons from comparative democracy show us that you can have robust democratic systems and institutions, but if you don't have strong democratic norms and culture to support those institutions, they can quickly crumble. 

Luckily, many organizations have emerged in the past five years to strengthen our civic culture, and philanthropy, spearheaded by organizations such as the New Pluralists, PACE, and the Democracy Funders Network, has begun to play an active role in building this field.  

Within this ecosystem, there are a few ways we seek to make a unique contribution. The first is that research and evidence are front and center in our work. We build tools based on the latest behavioral science research and we also conduct rigorous academic research to evaluate the effectiveness of our tools. We then iterate on an ongoing basis to continuously refine and improve our tools.

The second differentiator is we are specifically focused on working with students and equipping them with the skills and dispositions they need for citizenship. Few organizations are actively working on bridge-building among students. The largest players in this space are traditional civic education providers; however, they typically focus on civic knowledge, such as how the three branches of government operate. We see ourselves as a natural complement to this work by fostering the skills and dispositions needed for democratic citizenship – such as critical thinking, the ability to discuss complex social issues, and working with unlikely partners to solve collective challenges. 

CDI is applying an evidence-based approach and you are endeavoring to refine and enhance that research base as you proceed. What are the key academic insights that informed your work initially? What have you learned in the course of your work so far?

Our approach at CDI is that we seek to shift people's mindset and skill set when it comes to engaging across differences. We recognized from the start that both of these components are vital and neither would be sufficient on their own. 

When we talk about mindset, we're referring to the attitude people have towards engaging with ideas and individuals they disagree with. In our current climate, many people are very antagonistic towards those who differ from them. We see a lot of demonization, dogmatism, and a refusal to even engage. Many people have the perspective that "The other side is obviously wrong. Why would I even bother to hear them out?" 

We begin our work by shifting people's mindsets towards a posture of curiosity, openness, empathy, and humility. The reason for this is that if people are not coming to the table with an open mindset, you can do all the skill-building in the world, but when the time comes, they won't actually apply those skills because they have no motivation to do so. 

At the same time, we also recognize that engaging across differences is inherently difficult. Even if you're approaching it with the right mindset, we all stumble from time to time. That's why we teach learners a set of evidence-based techniques to navigate these conversations more effectively. We teach skills such as asking non-judgmental questions, active listening, validating the other person, and storytelling. 

In the past five years, we've conducted research with more than 50,000 learners, including conducting two randomized controlled trials, and we've found strong results demonstrating that learners are less polarized, display greater intellectual humility and empathy, and show improvement in their interpersonal conflict skills after completing our program. 

Our next frontier is moving beyond individual behavior change to focus on shifting institutional cultures. We believe by shifting the norms of schools and universities, we can have a more enduring impact on students and educators. 

One of the challenges with bridge-building efforts in civil society is the personal nature of the work is hard to scale. How are you endeavoring to tackle this challenge and reach more people with an effective dose of your program?

We specifically build educational technology that can be scaled to millions of people while maintaining implementation fidelity. We intentionally design our educational tools to be highly interactive and to adapt to learners based on their responses in order to create a personalized learning experience. Our educational tools try to capture that person-to-person experience by simulating what it would be like to have a conversation with someone about these topics. Research has shown that this approach is effective, which is highly encouraging. Right now, our biggest limitation to scale is convincing institutions to adopt our tools, rather than the tools themselves. 

Fast forward five years. If CDI is wildly successful in the meantime, how concretely will the world have changed for the better? What specific measures or milestones would you look to in order to gauge your progress?

Five years from now, we hope to have reached 3 million students and influenced them cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally to be better prepared for their role as citizens. From a cognitive perspective, students would have the skills to question their assumptions, evaluate evidence more objectively, and consider complex issues with nuance. From an emotional perspective, students would display greater openness towards those who differ from them and approach members of an "outgroup" with empathy and curiosity. Lastly, from a behavioral perspective, students would have the skills to discuss the most important issues of our time with their fellow citizens and be able to overcome their differences to creatively tackle our greatest societal challenges.

Thank you, Caroline, and Godspeed in this critical effort!